“From the age of 19, then,” said Ellery, “I saw Mrs. Cazalis as leading an unnatural, tense existence, complicated by strong maternal desires which were thwarted by the deaths of her two infants, her inability to have another child, and what could only have been a highly unsatisfactory and unsettling transference of her thwarted feelings to her niece. She knew that Lenore could never really be hers; Lenore’s mother is neurotic, jealous, possessive, infantile, and interfering — a source of unending trouble. Mrs. Cazalis is not an outgoing individual and apparently she never was. Her frustrations, then, grew inward; she contained them... for a long time.
“Until, in fact, she was past 40.
“Then she cracked.
“I say, Professor Seligmann, that one day Mrs. Cazalis told herself something that thenceforward became her only reason for living.
“Once she believed that, she was lost. Lost in the distorted world of psychosis.
“Because, Professor, I believe the oddest thing occurred. Mrs. Cazalis did not have to know that her husband thought he had murdered their children at birth; in fact, she undoubtedly did not know it — in her rational life — or their marriage would hardly have survived the knowledge for so many years. But I think she arrived at approximately the same point in her psychosis.
“I think she finally told herself: My husband gave thousands of living babies to other women, but when I was to have my own babies he gave me dead ones. So my husband killed them. He won’t let me have my children, so I won’t let them have their children. He killed mine; I’ll kill theirs.” And Ellery said, “Would it be possible for me to have more of that wonderful non-Viennese coffee, Professor Seligmann?”
“Ach.” Seligmann reached over and tugged at a bellpull. Frau Bauer appeared. “Elsa, are we barbarians? More coffee.”
“It’s all ready,” snapped Frau Bauer in German. And as she returned with two fat, steaming pots and fresh cups and saucers, she said, “I know you, you old Schuft. You are in one of your suicidal moods.” And she flounced out, banging the door.
“This is my life,” said the old man. He was regarding Ellery with bright eyes. “Do you know, Herr Queen, this is extraordinary. I can only sit and admire.”
“Yes?” said Ellery, not quite following but grateful for the gift of the jinni.
“For you have arrived, by an uncharted route, at the true destination.
“The trained eye looks upon your Mrs. Cazalis and one says: Here is a quiet, submissive type of woman. She is withdrawn, seclusive, asocial, frigid, slightly suspicious and hypercritical — I speak, of course, of the time when I knew her. Her husband is handsome, successful, and in his work — his obstetrical work — he is constantly in contact with other women, but in their married life her husband and she have disturbing conflicts and tensions. She has managed nevertheless to make an adjustment to life; in — as it were — a limping fashion.
“She has done nothing to warrant special notice. In fact, she has always been overshadowed by her husband and dominated by him.
“Then, in her 40s, something occurs. For years, secretly, she has been jealous of her husband’s rapport with younger women, his psychiatric patients — for it is interesting to note that in recent years, as Cazalis told me in Zürich, he has had an almost totally female clientele. She has not required ‘proof,’ for she has always been of a schizoid tendency; besides, there was probably nothing to ‘prove.’ No matter. Mrs. Cazalis’s schizoid tendency bursts forth in a delusional state.
“A frank paranoid psychosis.
“She develops the delusion that her own babies were killed by her husband. In order to deprive her of them. She may even think that he is the father of some of the children whose successful deliveries he performed. With or without the idea that her husband is their father, she sets out to kill them in retaliation.
“Her psychosis is controlled in her inner life. It is not expressed to the world except in her crimes.
“This is how the psychiatrist might describe the murderer you have delineated.
“As you see, Mr. Queen, the destination is the same.”
“Except that mine,” said Ellery, his smile slightly bitter, “seems to have been approached poetically. I recall the artist who kept depicting the stranger as a cat and I warm to his remarkable intuition. Doesn’t a tigress — that grandmother of cats — go ‘mad’ with rage when she is robbed of her cubs? Then, Professor, there’s the old saying, A woman hath nine lives like a cat. Mrs. Cazalis has nine lives to her debit, too. She killed and she killed until...”
“Yes?”
“Until one day Cazalis entertained a ghastly visitor.”
“The truth.”
Ellery nodded. “It could have come about in one of a number of ways. He might have stumbled on the hiding place of her stock of silk cords and recalled their visit to India years before and her purchase — not his — of the cords. Or perhaps it was one or two of the victims’ names striking a chord of memory; then it would require merely a few minutes with his old files to open his eyes. Or he may have noticed his wife acting oddly, followed her, and was too late to avert a tragedy but in quite sufficient time to grasp its sickening significance. He would go back in his mind to the recent past and discover that on the night of each murder he could not vouch for her whereabouts. Also, Cazalis suffers from chronic insomnia and he takes sleeping pills regularly; this, he would realize, had given her unlimited opportunities. And for purposes of slipping in and out of the building at night unobserved by the apartment house employees, there was always Cazalis’s office door, giving access directly to the street. As for the daytimes, a woman’s daytime excursions are rarely examined by her husband; in our American culture, in all strata, ‘shopping’ is the magic word, explaining everything... Cazalis may even have seen how, in the cunning of her paranoia, his wife had skipped over numerous eligibles on the list in order to strike at her niece — the most terrible of her murders, the murder of the unsatisfying substitute for her dead children — in order that she might maneuver Cazalis into the investigation and through him keep informed as to everything the police and I knew and planned.
“In any event, as a psychiatrist Cazalis would immediately grasp the umbilical symbolism in her choice of cords to strangle — as it were — babies; certainly the infantile significance of her consistent use of blue cords for male victims and pink cords for females could not have escaped him. He could trace her psychosis, then, to the traumatic source upon which her delusion had seized. It could only be the delivery room in which she had lost her own two children. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a merely clinical, if personally agonizing, observation, and Cazalis would either have taken the medical and legal steps usual in such cases or, if the prospect of revealing the truth to the world involved too much pain, mortification, and obloquy, he would at the least have put her where she could do no more harm.
“But the circumstances were not ordinary. There were his own old feelings of guilt which had expressed themselves through and revolved about that same delivery room. Perhaps it was the shock of realizing what lay behind his wife’s mental illness that revived the guilt feelings he had thought were dissolved. However it came about, Cazalis must have found himself in the clutch of his old neurosis, its tenacity increased a thousandfold by the shock of the discovery that had brought it alive again. Soon he was persuaded by his neurosis that it was all his fault; that had he not ‘murdered’ their two babies she would not have erupted into psychosis. The sin, then, was his; he alone was ‘responsible,’ therefore he alone must suffer the punishment.